1 A Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Korea and the United States, known as “the Shufeldt Treaty”, was signed in 1882. Treaties followed with Britain and Germany in November 1883, Italy and Russia in 1884, France in 1886 and subsequently with Austria, Denmark and Belgium. Pratt, Keith and Rutt, Richard, Korea, A Historical and Cultural Dictionary (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 496–7Google Scholar.

2 The name “Hermit Kingdom” first appeared in the article “Corea, last of the Hermit Nations”, The Independent, New York, May 1878. Since then it has frequently been used as a sobriquet for Korea, including in Griffis, William Elliot, Corea, the Hermit Nation (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1882)Google Scholar. Pratt and Rutt, Korea, 232.

3 Writings on Korea by early travellers, diplomats and others are too numerous to list here. For a good summary, see Uden, Martin, Times Past in Korea (London: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar. See also Brother Anthony's list of “old books” on Korea: http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/BooksKorea.htm [accessed 21 Jan. 2013]. For a discussion of early British writings on Korea, see Susan House Wade, “Representing colonial Korea in print and in visual imagery in England 1910–1939” (PhD thesis, University of Brighton, 2009).

4 Sung-hee, Eum [Ŏm Sŏng-hŭi], “Ilche sigi chaehan ilbonin ŭi ch'ŏngja chegak” (The production of Koryŏ celadon by Japanese residing in Korea during the colonial era), Han'guk kŭndae misulsahak 13, 2004, 175–7Google Scholar.

5 Macdonald, Sharon, “Collecting practices”, in Macdonald, Sharon (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 81Google Scholar.

6 Macdonald, “Collecting practices”, 83; Clifford, James, “On collecting art and culture”, in Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 94–107Google Scholar.

7 Hallam, Elizabeth and Street, Brian V., “Visualising ‘otherness’”, in Cultural Encounters. Representing Otherness (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 29Google Scholar.

8 Celadon wares are always included in volumes published by the National Museum of Korea featuring highlights of the collection, such as Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan, Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan 100-sŏn (100 highlights from the National Museum of Korea) (Kyŏnggi-do P‘aju-si: An Gŭrap‘iksŭ, 2006). Displays of such wares have formed an important component of major international exhibitions of Korean cultural heritage sponsored by the South Korean government, such as Masterpieces of Korean Art, which toured the USA in 1957–58, Korean Art Treasures, which was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1961, and Treasures from Korea, which opened at the British Museum in 1984. Charlotte Horlyck and Sascha Priewe, “Displaying Korean artefacts in the UK”, Museum & Society (forthcoming).

9 Eckardt, Andreas, A History of Korean Art (London and Leipzig: Edward Goldston and Karl W. Hiersemann, 1929)Google Scholar.

10 In a chapter entitled “A glance at Korean art”, Miln examines typical Korean artefacts, including ceramics, lacquerwares and bronzes, and discusses characteristic patterns. Much of Miln's text was drawn from Lowell, Percival, Chosön: the Land of the Morning Calm. A Sketch of Korea (Boston: Tickner, 1886)Google Scholar. Lowell wrote the book after spending the winter of 1883–84 in Korea. Miln also relied on notes given to her by her friend Mrs. Q. who, according to Miln, “had the unique experience of seeing Korea”. Miln, Louise Jordan, Quaint Korea (London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1895), 9–10, 209–25Google Scholar. The Frenchman Maurice Courant's (1865–1935) numerous works on Korea should also be mentioned here. Among his many publications relevant to this study is Souvenir de Séoul, Corée (Paris: Publisher unknown, 1900)Google Scholar in which he makes brief mention of Korean artworks. It is noteworthy that ceramics are the only pre-nineteenth-century artefacts that he includes in the volume. However, he only describes them in vague terms, indicating how little was known about them at this time. Courant, Souvenir de Séoul, v.

11 Wilkinson, Liz, “Collecting Korean art at the Victoria and Albert Museum 1888–1938”, Journal of the History of Collections 15/2, 2003, 243CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Coulson, Constance J. D., Korea. Peeps at Many Lands (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1910), 35–6Google Scholar.

13 Wade, “Representing colonial Korea”, 29.

14 Bailey, Lisa and Wilkinson, Liz, “Korean art in the Victoria and Albert Museum”, Korean Culture 18 (Spring 1997), 5Google Scholar.

15 Saunderson, H. S., “Korea and its people”, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 24, 1895, 312CrossRefGoogle Scholar; F. S. K., “Korean pottery”, Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 9, no. 54 (December 1911), 63Google Scholar.

16 He acquired one such box, which, along with paper samples and ginseng specimens, he donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in the late nineteenth century. Carles, William R., Life in Corea (London: Macmillan and Co., 1888), 37Google Scholar. See also Wilkinson, “Collecting Korean art”, 244.

17 Gilmore, George G., Corea of Today (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1894), 107Google Scholar. See also Hamilton, Angus, Korea; Its History, Its People, and Its Commerce (Boston and Tokyo: J. B. Millet Co., 1910), 29Google Scholar.

18 Wilkinson, “Collecting Korean art”, 244.

19 Wilkinson, “Collecting Korean art”, 244.

20 Pierre Louis Jouy, The Collection of Korean Mortuary Pottery in the U.S. National Museum. Smithsonian Annual Report (Washington: US National Museum, 1888), 589. Jouy was an employee of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He collected several ceramics, religious objects, textiles and other artefacts for the museum when he visited Korea in the early 1880s. Houchins, Chang-su Cho, An Ethnography of the Hermit Kingdom. The J. B. Bernadou Korean Collection 1884–85 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2004), 18–9Google Scholar.

21 Horace Allen arrived in Korea in December 1884 as he had been summoned to care for those injured in the Kapsin Coup. Later he became US Minister and Consul General in Seoul. Allen, Horace N., Things Korean. A Collection of Sketches and Anecdotes Missionary and Diplomatic (London and New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1908), 210–11Google Scholar.

22 For some the sharing of knowledge formed part of personal friendships. For example, the American collector and founder of the Freer Gallery of Art, Charles L. Freer (1854–1919) became a close friend of Hara Tomitarō (1868–1938) and Masuda Takashi (1848–1938), both of whom were keen collectors of Korean art. Gompertz, Godfrey St. G. M., “The study and appreciation of Koryo wares”, in Byung-chang, Rhee (ed.), Kankoku bijutsu shūsen (Masterpieces of Korean art), Volume 2 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1978), 422Google Scholar.

23 Yasuburō, Itō and Shōtarō, Nishimura, Kōryū-shō (Koryŏ celadon) (Tokyo: Itō Yasuburō and Nishimura Shōtarō, 1910), 4–5Google Scholar.

24 Kil-chun, Yu, annotated by Hŏ Kyŏng-chin, Sŏyugyŏnmun (Observations on travels in the West) (Kyŏnggi-do P'aju-si: Sŏhae munjip, 2004), 402Google Scholar. Yu wrote Sŏyugyŏnmun around 1889, but the volume was not published until 1895.

25 Adams, Edward B., Korea's Pottery Heritage, Vol. II (Seoul: Seoul International Publishing House, 1990), 101–3Google Scholar. See also, Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan, Miguk, Han'guk misul ŭl mannada (Korean Art from the United States) (Seoul: National Museum of Korea, 2012), 2Google Scholar.

26 On first seeing the dish, Allen felt it looked like “quite ordinary chinaware”. Allen, Things Korean, 211–2. The dish is likely to be the one illustrated in Walter Hough, who states that it was given by “the King of Korea to Dr. Allen”. Walter Hough, The Bernadou, Allen and Jouy Corean Collections in the United States National Museum. From the Report of the U.S. National Museum, 1891 (Washington: Government Printing, 1893), 437.

27 Miln, Quaint Korea, 212.

28 F. S. K., “Korean pottery”, 63.

29 Rackham, Bernard, Catalogue of the Le Blond Collection of Corean Pottery (London: H.M. Stationeary Office, 1918), 4Google Scholar.

30 Fujita was professor at the Keijo [Seoul] Imperial University (Keijō Teikoku Daigaku 京城帝国大学) and became director of the Museum of the Government-General of Korea (Chosǒn Ch'ongdokpu pangmulgwan 朝鮮總督府博物館) in Seoul. Ryōsaku, Fujita, “Ōbei no hakubutsukan to Chōsen (ge)” (Museums in Europe and America (part 2), Chōsen 164, 1929, 28Google Scholar. For a discussion of Fujita's archaeological work on the Korean peninsula, see Pai, Hyung Il, “The politics of Korea's past: The legacy of Japanese colonial archaeology in the Korean peninsula”, East Asian History 7 (June 1994), 42–3Google Scholar.

31 Pierson, Stacey, Collectors, Collections and Museums. The Field of Chinese Ceramics in Britain 1560–1960 (New York and Vienna: Peter Lang, 2007), 89–94Google Scholar.

32 Burlington Fine Arts Club, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Early Chinese Pottery and Porcelain (London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1911), xviiiGoogle Scholar, quoted in Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums, 94.

33 Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums, 97.

34 Raphael Petrucci, “Corean pottery”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 22, no. 116 (November 1912), 87.

35 The bibliography in Rackham's volume on the Le Blond collection of Korean ceramics offers a good indication of published scholarship on Korean ceramic history in the late 1910s. Rackham, Catalogue of the Le Blond Collection, vii–viii.

36 John Platt noted that: “The Korean tomb finds are worthy of the most careful study, and can help a great deal in our understanding of the early Chinese ware”. John Platt, “Korean pottery”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 36, no. 205 (April 1920), 203. See also John Platt, “Ancient Korean tomb wares”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 22, no. 116 (November 1912), 230.

37 R. L. Hobson, “Sung and Yüan wares in a New York exhibition”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 24, no. 132 (March 1914), 320–23.

38 Horlyck and Priewe, “Displaying Korean artefacts”.

39 Clifford, “On collecting art and culture”, 100.

40 This was noted by Walter Hough, who wrote that: “Great interest centers in Korea from the fact that we have there a human exemplification of the survival of the whole genera of industries and customs, while in surrounding regions these have been swept away or transformed.” Hough, The Bernadou, Allen and Jouy Corean Collections, 432.

41 Jouy, Collection of Korean Mortuary Pottery, 589. Jouy's views were later reiterated by Geare, Randolph I. in “The potter's art in Korea”, The Craftsman VII, no. 3 (December 1904), 294–8Google Scholar.

42 A case in point is Platt, “Ancient Korean tomb wares”.

43 In 1979, the South Korean government sent a large-scale exhibition entitled 5000 Years of Korean Art on a tour of the United States. The exhibition catalogue made no mention of celadon having been used as tomb goods, nor did it refer to how or when they became collectors' items. In contrast, the catalogue of an earlier travelling exhibition of Korean art, Masterpieces of Korean Art, also sponsored by South Korea, noted that “Koryŏ celadon was buried with its owners and recovered only in this century, mostly in a virtual hysteria of surreptitious digging in the ten thousand graves of the Kaesŏng area during the first decades of the 20th century”. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Masterpieces of Korean Art: An Exhibition under the Auspices of the Government of the Republic of Korea (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art [et al.], 1957), 19Google Scholar. For comparison see, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 5,000 Years of Korean Art (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 1979)Google Scholar.

44 Carles, Life in Corea, 139. Carles purchased two ewers, a meibyǒng prunus vase, a bowl, a dish, two cups and two cup stands.

45 Carles, Life in Corea, 140–41.

46 Gowland resided in Japan between 1872 and 1888 and worked for the Imperial Japanese Mint. Gowland, William, “Notes on the dolmens and other antiquities of Korea”, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 24, 1895, 322CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Gowland, “Dolmens and other antiquities of Korea”, 322.

48 Gompertz, Godfrey St. G. M., Korean Celadon and Other Wares of the Koryŏ Period (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 14Google Scholar.

49 This is mentioned by Western and Japanese authors. See, for example, Platt, “Ancient Korean tomb wares”, 229; Rackham, Catalogue of the Le Blond Collection, 4; Itō and Nishimura, Kōryū-shō, 2.

50 Takehiko, Okudaira, “Chōsen shutsudo no shina tōjiki zakken” (Miscellaneous findings of Chinese porcelain in Korea), Tōji IX, no. 2 (May 1937), 1–11Google Scholar; Godfrey St. G. M. Gompertz, “Gilded wares of Sung and Koryo. I. Gilded Sung wares”, The Burlington Magazine 98, no. 642 (September 1956), 300–03.

51 Okudaira, “Chōsen shutsudo no shina tōjiki zakken”, 1–11; Horlyck, Charlotte, “Gilded celadon wares of the Koryŏ kingdom (918–1392 ce)”, Artibus Asiae LXXII, no. 1, 2012, 118Google Scholar.

52 Several of the objects are illustrated in Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan, Chungguk toja (Chinese ceramics) (Seoul: National Museum of Korea, 2007)Google Scholar.

53 Portal, Jane, “Korean ceramics in the British Museum – a century of collecting”, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 60, 1995–96, 50–53Google Scholar.

54 Gowland, “Dolmens and other antiquities of Korea”, 317.

55 Portal, “Korean ceramics in the British Museum”, 53. See also Portal, Jane, “The origins of the British Museum's Korean collection”, Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch 70, 1995, 42–4Google Scholar.

56 Morse's Korean ceramics are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan, Han'guk misul ŭl mannada, 14.

57 This view reflected the trope of colonial writings about non-Western civilizations.

58 For example, in 1884 the Smithsonian attaché John Baptiste Bernadou wrote to Spencer F. Baird, Director of the National Museum, Washington D.C., that many paintings of the Chosŏn period were coarse and that “there are no living artists of note in Corea”. Houchins, Ethnography of the Hermit Kingdom, 144–5.

59 F. S. K.'s statement that the “best period of pottery-making in Korea began under Korai [Koryŏ] kings … and ended with them” was common in writings of the 1910s and 1920s. F. S. K., “Korean pottery”, 63. For similar views, see also d'O Warner, Lorraine, “Korean grave pottery of the Korai dynasty”, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 6/3 (April 1919), 460Google Scholar; and Eckardt, History of Korean Art, 169.

60 Brandt, Kim, “Objects of desire: Japanese collectors and colonial Korea”, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8/3 (Winter 2000), 736CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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62 Itō and Nishimura, Kōryū-shō, 5.

63 Eumorfopoulos, George, Preface to The Eumorfopoulos Collection, Vol. I, by Hobson, R. L. (London: E. Benn Ltd., 1925)Google Scholar, quoted in Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums, 91.

64 F. S. K., “Korean pottery”, 64; Hobson, “Sung and Yüan wares”, 322–3.

65 Sōetsu, Yanagi, Yanagi Sōetsu zenshū (Collected works of Yanagi Sōetsu) Vol. 6 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1980–92), 89–109Google Scholar, quoted in Brandt, “Objects of desire”, 734–6.

66 Gompertz, Godfrey St. G. M., “The appeal of Korean celadon”, Oriental Art XXIII, no. 1, (Spring 1977), 63–4Google Scholar.

67 Koyama, Fujio, “Koryo celadon”, in Rhee, Byung-chang (ed.), Kankoku bijutsu ShūsenGoogle Scholar, 412; Gompertz, Korean Celadon and Other Wares, 3–4.

68 Platt, “Ancient Korean tomb wares”, 229.

69 The chamber contained twelve pieces of celadon, a gilt-bronze hairpin and three bronze coins, now housed in the National Museum of Korea. Chōsen Sōtokufu, Taishō 5-nendo koseki chōsa hōkoku (1916 Report on investigations of historic remains) (Keijō [Seoul]: Chōsen Sōtokufu 1916), 512–6. For a discussion of the tomb and its contents, see Horlyck, Charlotte, “Burial offerings to objets d'art: Celadon wares of the Koryŏ kingdom (ad 918–1392)”, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 73, 2008–09, 84Google Scholar.

70 The findings were published in Chōsen Sōtokufu, Koseki chōsa hōkoku.

71 Hulbert, Homer B., The Passing of Korea (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906), 568Google Scholar.

72 Saunderson, “Korea and its people”, 312.

73 Platt, “Ancient Korean tomb wares”, 229.

74 Gompertz, “The study and appreciation of Koryo wares”, 420.

75 Park So-hyŏn, “Koryŏ chagi”, 13.

76 Platt, “Ancient Korean tomb wares”, 229. In contrast to the royal family and high-ranking aristocrats, lesser-ranking members of Koryŏ society were interred in pit tombs that were marked with a small earthen mound. For a discussion of different methods of burial in Koryŏ, see Horlyck, Charlotte, “Ways of burial in Koryŏ times”, in Horlyck, Charlotte and Pettid, Michael (eds), Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: Critical Aspects of Death from Ancient to Contemporary Times (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 A substantial part of Le Blond's Korean objects came into the V&A permanently in 1918. In 1937 the V&A further acquired from him a smaller number of Koryŏ and Chosŏn ceramics. Wilkinson, “Collecting Korean art”, 248–50. For the 1937 acquisitions, see V&A Archive, MA/1/L594, nominal file: Le Blond, Mr & Mrs Aubrey.

78 Le Blond purchased his objects through a Korean dealer in Seoul, who apparently spoke English well. Blond, Mrs Aubrey Le, Day In, Day Out (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head Limited, 1928), 162–4Google Scholar.

79 Pai, “The politics of Korea's past”, 32–3.

80 V&A Archive, MA/1/H1842, nominal File: Hewlett A S (Rev).

81 Pai, Hyung Il, “The creation of national treasures and monuments: the 1916 Japanese laws on the preservation of Korean remains and relics and their colonial legacies”, Korean Studies 25/1, 2001, 78–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 For example, it led Bernard Rackham to urge the V&A to purchase Aubrey Le Blond's collection of Chosŏn porcelains, arguing that it was “difficult nowadays to obtain [it] elsewhere, owing to official restrictions of exports from Korea”. V&A Archive, MA/1/L594, nominal file: Le Blond.

83 Pai, “The politics of Korea's past”, 28–9.

84 Scott, Rosemary E., “The Chinese imperial collections”, in Pierson, Stacey (ed.), Collecting Chinese Art: Interpretation and Display (London: Percival David Foundation, 2000), 19–32Google Scholar.

85 Warner, Lorraine D'O, “Kōrai celadon in America”, Eastern Art. An Annual II, 1930, 65Google Scholar.

86 It was renamed the Museum of the Yi Royal Family (Yi wangga pangmulgwan 李王家博物館) in 1911, following the annexation of Korea.

87 Kojong proclaimed the Korean Empire in 1897, but was in 1907 forced to abdicate by the Japanese.

88 Komiya included this anecdote in the introduction to the first illustrated catalogue of the Museum of the Yi Royal Family, published in 1912. Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan, Han'guk pangmulgwan kaegwan 100 chunyǒn kinyǒm t'ŭkpyǒlchǒn (Korean Museums' 100 year celebration) (Seoul: National Museum of Korea, 2009), 38Google Scholar.

89 Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan, Han'guk pangmulgwan kaegwan, 25.

90 Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan, Han'guk pangmulgwan kaegwan, 28.

91 Thomas Cook and Son, Cook's Guide to Peking, North China, South Manchuria, Korea (Peking: The North-China Daily News & Herald, Ltd., 1924), 134Google Scholar.

92 Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan, Han'guk pangmulgwan kaegwan, 31–3.

93 The museum was renamed the National Museum of Korea (Kungnip pangmulgwan 국립박물관) in 1945. It took its present name of Kungnip chungang pangmulgwan, likewise translated as National Museum of Korea, in 1972. During the colonial period branch museums were opened in Kyǒngju (in 1926), Pyǒngyang (in 1931), Kaesǒng (in 1933) and Puyǒ (in 1939). Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan, Han'guk pangmulgwan kaegwan, 47.

94 Brinkley himself wrote the catalogue: Description of “the Brinkley collection” of antique Japanese, Chinese and Korean Porcelain, Pottery and Faience (New York: E. Greey, 1885)Google Scholar. See also Horlyck, “Burial offerings”, 81–3.

95 Itō and Nishimura, Kōryū-shō, 3–12.

96 Young-na, Kim, foreword to Hae-hoon, Park and Sung-wook, Jang (eds), Ch'ŏnha cheil pisaek ch'ŏngja (The best under heaven, the celadons of Korea) (Seoul: Kungnip chung'ang pangmulgwan, 2012), 4Google Scholar.